Fleabag made me cry and I'm still kind of mad about it.

Like the rest of the internet, I watched all of Fleabag over the course of two nights a few weeks ago, spurred on by:

1. a desire to watch something else while Game of Thrones was airing so I didn’t inadvertently spoil myself before I was able to, ahh, acquire the episode for viewing later that evening);

2. lots of internet folks I know raving about it;

3. and like 347 internet thinkpieces on Andrew Scott, Hot Priest

While I was expecting raunchy, weird comedy — and certainly got exactly that — I was not expecting to also sob through half of the episodes? Starting with the finale of season one, then through honestly most of season two, it was like someone turned the waterworks on.

In the interim between watching the show, starting this post, and today, pretty much the rest of the world has also watched Fleabag, so my takes here aren’t anything particularly new, if you’re a Very Online person. (If you’re not a Very Online person, I congratulate you and envy you.)

I can’t say I have much in common with the titular character — her particular trauma and her particular brand of dysfunctional/toxic family aren’t my own personal hang-ups — but there is something about being a somewhat-adrift 30-something, single, kind of feeling like nothing you do will ever get you anywhere in life that resonated with me.

Fleabag’s “I want someone to tell me how to live my life” monologue absolutely gutted me. It’s not only because the first time the character has been this honest and transparent in the whole series. It’s that her terror that everything she’s done to date in her life is wrong, that no matter what she does or says or tries or believes, she’s doing something wrong, and that if only she knew the right answer — if only she had someone to just tell her the right answer to absolve her from the dizzying fear of having to choose, and choose wrong, again — that maybe her life would be back on track.

Reader, I cried. And when I was rewatching a bit of the finale of season two the other day for Reasons and, yep, tears again, so even on repeat viewings it got me right where I live.

It seems like such a universal sort of terror — or maybe not universal, but definitely a terror I deal with on a frequent basis: The fear that your life is going to amount to nothing, and that if you’d only done this better, or tried harder at that, or didn’t lose connection with some figure from your past, that maybe it would have all turned out different.

Like. I’m not going to lie. Is my life what I thought it would be? (No.) Do I feel like I’m doing even the smallest things right? (No.) Do I very often feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, and will keep on spinning them until my heart gives out or I get hit by a bus or I trip over a cat, fall down the stairs, and break my neck? (Yes.) It would be an astounding comfort to just give it all up — in a completely secular, not a give-up-your-life-to-Jesus-and/or-God way, but also not in a sexual someone-read-too-much-50-Shades-of-Grey way — to someone who can say: “Take these steps. Do this, this, and this. And then you’ll be good. You’ll be on the right path. Things will be cool.”

Generally speaking, though, the world doesn’t work like that. Tough break, though, for those of us who just want to know what we’re doing wrong and how we fix it.

Anyway, the internet is rightfully having a hell of a time with Andrew Scott, Hot Priest, but there’s a poignancy to that entire plotline that I found unexpected.

It’s about being seen, more than anything else. No one in Fleabag’s family truly sees her, not all the time. She’s the scapegoat, she’s the troubled one, she’s the one who makes a mess of everything. She’s where every messy, uncomfortable, unacceptable feeling gets placed in that family, and she takes it all in until she explodes.

The unexpected intimacy of the priest seeing her, seeing her fears and her anxieties, seeing how she is vulnerable, seeing how she is trying to be better — that’s what is so terrifying, and so alluring, about their story together. Isn’t that what we all want in a partner? Someone who knows us, who wants to know us, flaws and all?

Watch Fleabag. It’s a weird show. The breaking-of-the-fourth wall was an instant grind-my-teeth moment at first, but I pushed on and didn’t regret it.

Also, there’s a hella cute guinea pig, if that’s an extra incentive at all.